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From GPS to Viz: Hiking Washington's Trails

Since moving to the Seattle area in early 2013, we've been doing our best as a family to tromp our way through the lush, scenic trails around us, guided by a helpful little orange book entitled "Best Hikes with Kids: Western Washington & the Cascades". At first, my gentle suggestion (read: stubborn insistence) to hit the trails was met with some light resistance (read: outright mutiny) from my two iPad-wielding boys, but not so much any more, I'm happy to say.

Being a data guy, I wanted to track our every step through the Pacific Northwest, so I downloaded an app for my iPhone called Backpacker GPS Trails Pro. It's great - it tracks our coordinates and lets us capture photos or video along the way, among other things. The default dashboard on TrimbleOutdoors.com is nice and all, but, well - I told you I was a data guy - I wanted to make my own.

First, I'll show you what I made to track our treks, and then I'll show you how I managed to go from GPS to viz in 7 steps. Click the image below to open an interactive version:

How to go from GPS to Viz - 7 Steps

STEP 1: RECORD the trip & SYNC the app

This is the best part. Get out there, enjoy the trail, and make sure to hit the start button on the app. Here are some screen shots from a recent trip we took:

STEP 2: DOWNLOAD the data in .gpx format

First, I had to log in to my account on TrimbleOutdoors.com. You may have a different GPS app, which is fine, but just make sure it's one that allows you to download your data. If your app's site lets you get the data in spreadsheet form, all the better. Mine didn't, so I had to first get the .gpx file. Here's a screenshot of the download page:

STEP 3: CONVERT the .gpx file to .txt

Next, I had to get the data into a text file, which was quite easy to do once I found a useful site called GPS Visualizer. It's free to use (they accept donations), and you just indicate that you want a Plain text output, choose the .gpx file from your Download folder, check the boxes to add estimated fields, and Convert. Here's how that looks:

STEP 4: CLEAN UP the data spreadsheet

This step involves opening the .txt file from step 3, getting rid of any header rows, moving the multimedia files to the bottom of the list, combining multiple .txt files into one spreadsheet and giving each its own unique hike name. Here is a screenshot showing the original .txt file and the fully formatted spreadsheet:

STEP 5: CONNECT Tableau to the cleaned up .txt file

Open Tableau Desktop (or Tableau Public), and click "Connect to Data", select Microsoft Excel, navigate to your hike spreadsheet, drag the sheet into the middle area, and then click "Go to Worksheet".

STEP 6: CREATE your viz

Use Tableau's UI to drag and drop your data fields onto the canvas and create Sheets, Dashboards and Stories. I used a few advanced features in this workbook, including:

A web page object on the Dashboard that dynamically links to each hosted photo on TrimbleOutdoors.com based on the URL column in my data. Note that I also changed the size of the photos since the large images took a long time for the Trimble Outdoors servers to load. Smaller photos were obtainable using a URL parameter ("?size=Size265x180"). Drag a web page object onto the dashboard, click OK, and then select Dashboard > Actions > Add Action > URL and fill out the dialog box as follows:

STEP 7: PUBLISH to Tableau Public & EMBED in your website

The Last Leg

This was a fun personal project that I made for my boys, so I took some extra steps to add design elements to the dashboard. I was shooting for a hand-made / trail map / scrap book feel, hence the hand-written font instructions, compass image, photo corner tacks, tally mark image, etc. The mountain shape cut-away at the top of the viz is actually from a photo of the Olympics here in Washington, so I tried to stay true to the territory with each design element.

Let me know if you make good use of this tutorial, and if you have any other questions about how it was made.

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